Forget Delayed Listening. Podcasts are Played Immediately.

During Edison Research's presentation of The Podcast Consumer 2016, they revealed a critical fact about podcast consumption - one that has a huge effect on the podcast advertising ecosystem.

In the graph below, you'll see that 79% of listeners click on a podcast and listen to it immediately. This is in comparison to 49% of consumers that download podcasts manually to listen to later, and 36% that subscribe to a podcast and get the episodes downloaded automatically to listen to later.

What’s more, even when listeners download a podcast to listen to later, the majority (55%) listen to the podcast within 24 hours.

Bottom line: more podcast listeners are not downloading podcasts and never listening to them. Instead, they are listening within 24 hours, if not immediately after selecting the podcast.

This is significant to advertisers, as they can now have more confidence that their podcast ads are not only being listened to, but that they are being listened to close to the time of download, making their ads more relevant and timely.